


Rocket's tail

by maybeillride



Series: Songfics [9]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Canon, Eruri Week 2017, Grief/Mourning, Healing, I Love You, M/M, POV Erwin Smith, Post-War, Starting Over, Wish Fulfillment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 21:41:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11745747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybeillride/pseuds/maybeillride
Summary: The first time Erwin sees Levi again, he thinks he’s entered a dream. A disorienting, mysterious dream.





	Rocket's tail

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WhyTheHandbasket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyTheHandbasket/gifts).



> This angsty little thing is for [WhyTheHandbasket](http://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyTheHandbasket/pseuds/WhyTheHandbasket), whose [All That I Am](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11281290/chapters/25233075) proves beyond a doubt that art and pure feeling knows no fandom <3 (don't worry G, you don't have to read this ;D)
> 
> I also dedicate it to [popnographic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/popnographic/pseuds/popnographic), [Meatball](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball/pseuds/Meatball) and brainindacloudz, for your excellent shipping taste ;D
> 
> Thank you so much to the tremendous organizers and amazing artists and authors for [Eruri Week 2017](http://eruriweek.tumblr.com). *wow*

The first time Erwin sees Levi again, he thinks he’s entered a dream. A disorienting, mysterious dream.

Levi is dressing. It’s full dark outside the window, and he hasn’t bothered to light a lamp. He’s dressing in the shadows, the way he likes to do when left to his own devices.

A memory comes to him, of rushing down the hall to get Levi’s last-minute advice on… something, some strategy. What was it, exactly? And pushing his door open to this ridiculous full-blackness, Levi blinking up at him from where he was making his bed. He was bent over, folding the sheets just-so under the mattress as if someone would actually dare inspect _Captain Levi’s_ quarters. His face was caught between irritation and expectation in the sudden slash of light into the room.

“Levi!” Erwin thinks he said. “For the love of God, we aren’t that broke. Light a lamp.”

He remembers Levi’s response, though. The little man tossed his head back, and Erwin watched his eyes roll, and his lips turn up, just the slightest. “Whatd’ya think the moon is for? No wonder we have such money problems, with you in charge.”

So, Levi is dressing. And Erwin knows it’s a dream, because he’s never been allowed this level of casual intimacy with his Captain. He never knew, for instance, that Levi leaves his socks off until the very last possible minute before he has to pull his boots on, like he can’t bear to have them on his feet. He never knew Levi takes the trouble to heat an iron and run it over his slacks, his shirt, before pulling them on. In their line of work, with its blood and mud, and its sweat on the best of days. He didn’t even know Levi owned an iron.

But his fingernails are too short. Erwin watches his fingers move over each button and the tips look angry and raw, like Levi has bitten them. He never knew Levi to bite his nails.

Erwin watches his Captain, transfixed by his face. Levi stares up and into nothing, it seems. Into the darkness of the room, and somehow, right up to where Erwin…stands? Where Erwin hangs, waiting and watching in spellbound silence.

Levi’s face reveals everything he works so hard to control. It’s the face he met first, the raw defiance Levi tossed over his shoulder as he rocketed at unfathomable speed through the Underground, the pure disgust with which he met Erwin’s offer. To be fair, he was kneeling in a filthy puddle, so it was a stacked negotiation at best.

Yet Levi had stared at Erwin as if he was ready to kill him then and there. He stared at Erwin as if his knife, that fell to the ground between them, would have been an unsatisfying weapon anyway. Erwin remembers his quick-flash impression, the ones he treasures for their unerring accuracy: Watch this one. He’s capable of anything.

 _The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference,_ comes to him, but he’s unsure from where.

Levi has dropped his mask as if it never existed. He stands before Erwin, his stance straight and almost defiant. But there’s something undeniably soft and vulnerable in the way his cravat unfurls untied down his chest, leaving his neck open and bare. His face _aches_ , like all the pain and passion Erwin knows is somewhere deep in him is at the surface, is opening his eyes wide as if Levi is straining to see into the dark ahead of him.

And Erwin finds that he’s aching, too… that he’s wished for nothing, not victory, not even understanding, so much as he just wants to reach out, right now. He wishes to reach out and lay a hand on Levi’s cheek, to stroke his temple with his thumb. It’s the simplest kind of call-and-response. Levi’s liquid eyes call to him, and he wants nothing more than to give him comfort.

Then Levi's whispering. His voice is so quiet, he hardly breaks the thick silence in the room. He just lays his words on it, the way Erwin used to send his paper boats sailing away down the gutters when he was a boy.

“Do you know how much I hate you, you giant bastard?” 

_I love you,_ Erwin thinks, without even thinking, automatic, the words as true to him in the dream as the fact that he has blond hair. He knows it, in the way you’re sure of things in dreams down to your bones that you struggle to remember when you wake up.

Levi tilts his head to the side, and Erwin watches his eyes go far away.

“You dragged us up on the roof. In _November_. Do you remember how fucking cold it was? Coldest winter ever. And still you kept us out there, for hours. You were trying to see some comet.” His eyes cut back, to dead-center where Erwin waits, rapt to hear what he has to say.

“You wouldn’t shut up about how lucky we were. On and on, how there were only two chances to see it in a human lifespan. One, if you’re talking about the Survey Corps.”

He stops to huff a little laugh though he isn’t smiling. And Erwin can see it, the two of them huddled against the wall in their field coats. Maybe sharing a flask back and forth. But the picture is all suggestion. When was this…? When was Halley’s comet due, again? When was that particularly ball-breaking winter, when they had to sacrifice a whole barrack’s bunks for fuel…

He’s coming up empty. The facts that usually sit waiting in neat lines ready for him are nowhere to be found. He wonders more how he has forgotten sitting on the roof with Levi, staring up at the sky like it actually meant something. He can’t even recall if they actually saw it.

Levi has slipped away, standing by his open wardrobe with its neat rows of combat and dress uniforms. He shrugs into Erwin’s black coat, each movement stiff and angry. He looks so small in it, small and pale. And now that he’s moving it’s like he can’t bear to be still a second more. He strides to the door.

Erwin wants to follow but Levi is a dream-hallway getting further and further away. Yet, dream-logically, the husk of Levi’s muttering is as clear as if he was whispering in Erwin’s ear:

“I should’ve known then that you were crazy. But I looked just as hard. So I guess that makes me crazy, too.”

Levi is surprisingly gentle with the door as he closes it behind him. He takes all the light with him as he goes.

*

Erwin learns quickly that it wasn’t a dream.

It’s not a dream, for one, because after Levi softly closes the door and sends him back into the blackness, he never wakes up. Not to his former life, anyway.

His next moment of any awareness opens wide and fast, and _bright_ , so bright after all that darkness. He’s the wind, and he’s a stutter of sunbeams flickering past, there and gone and leaving him blinking. But most of all he’s aware of Levi just in front of him, flying between trees with Erwin some kind of secret passenger.

Levi’s field cloak flickers madly around him and Levi’s hair ruffles back in waves, yet here riding with him (…?) Erwin is in some peaceful eye of the hurricane.

 _This must be how the rest of the flock feels behind the lead bird,_ he marvels, and all he has to do is relax and enjoy the magic of Levi’s flight. Erwin is so enchanted, he doesn’t even realize everything is losing color until he’s in darkness again.

That’s how it goes for him for a while… leapfrogging from one secret, stolen moment to the next, bright jewels on a dark string. Even without much else to do in his new passivity, Erwin can’t count them all. They’re the irreplaceable moments of a life, of Levi’s life, and Erwin witnesses Levi unraveling all that he could not.

He rides with Levi to the basement. He joins Levi at the seaside. He leans against the wall of his old office as Levi pushes a document across his old desk, and as Hanji hardly glances at it before standing and coming around to salute him, then hug him, fiercely. Erwin somehow is able to hang back and give his two favorite people the privacy they deserve.

After Levi’s resignation from the Corps – an act Erwin simultaneously can and can’t believe – they spend one long, unbroken moment together. In his timelessness Erwin doesn’t know how long they get.

It could be a whole year. It’s summer when Levi sets out of the gates with his sleeves rolled up, and autumn-cold in Levi’s cheeks as he hurries to slot his efficient little log cabin together, in a valley beside a noisy stream. He keeps nervously watching the sky as he chops cord after cord of wood, and Erwin wants to laugh (indulgently) and tell him not to worry so much. But Erwin is the one proven wrong when he blinks awake over Levi’s shoulder to a thick carpet of white morning snow outside.

Erwin never particularly liked winter, but trapped in the dim and safe little cabin with Levi he realizes how wrong he was.

Levi reads. He carves chunks of wood into horses and queens and pawns, and carefully inks a grid on a piece of fabric for a board. His chess games against himself stretch out with unusual clarity. It’s like his strategic thought is summoning Erwin. He tinkers around his little home, nailing back roof beams before they collapse under the weight of all the snow. He bakes bread and Erwin breathes in the rich taste.

Sometimes, morning becomes afternoon in the cabin and still Levi stays curled up on his side on his lumpy homemade mattress. And those are the days Levi is clearest to him. It goes beyond how he looks on the outside, beyond his shaggy black hair sticking from the top of the blanket and the slow rise and fall of his torso as he breathes.

Levi sometimes cries on those days, and the tears sneak silently down Erwin’s cheeks. Sometimes he stares up at the rafters and Erwin shares the weight of the nothing stretching out in his mind. Some days he sleeps, and Erwin follows him into what can only be Levi’s dreams. It’s always the same on days like these: Levi chases something or someone, blades ready for the kill. It’s a done deal. No one and nothing can escape him –

But Erwin’s right behind him, massive, _titanic_ , gaining. And Levi knows it, his eyes wide with fear as he shoots a look over his shoulder (quickly; one wrong move at these speeds and he’s dead, Ackerman or not). Erwin chases him, reaching a hand to snatch him out of the air.

He feels no horror, no need to stop. All he knows is this _hunger_.

Levi always wakes up before Erwin can catch him… or, just maybe, Erwin might wake them up, as he backpedals away from his titan mind like it’s a snake about to bite him. Levi sits up in bed, gasping. And Erwin imagines a left arm, a right arm. He imagines settling himself down behind the small body, wracked with such pain. He wraps Levi in his imagined arms and closes them, until he feels Levi’s sweat wick away and his heart settle. And with a sigh he can almost hear, Erwin imagines resting his head on Levi’s shoulder.

*

Levi moves from the cabin in the spring, as soon as the crocus start poking their way through the melting snow under the trees. Erwin comes with him as he shoulders everything he owns and closes the door behind him. They look up at the cabin together, at the roof that somehow survived the winter as surely as Levi did. Before he sets off, Levi picks a handful of flowers to leave on the threshold. Their yellow is so bright in the gray day, it almost vibrates.

*

Erwin almost doesn’t recognize Levi when he sees him next.

Erwin is pushing through a door, a handsome wooden thing with a circular piece of blue blown-glass in the center for a window. A bell jingles, distant and muffled like he has cotton stoppers in his ears.

He finds himself in a symphony of scent, low notes of cinnamon and high notes of bergamot, a sweet thread of jasmine running through. He doesn’t bother questioning how he would know all this.

It’s a teashop, a cozy and tidy place. It’s _Levi’s_ teashop, a place as obviously his as the sparkling ballrooms of the Capitol obviously weren’t. Then the man himself is turning from shelves packed with tins to face Erwin, and his little face brightens like the sun.

He looks… healthy, like someone who’s done a tremendous amount of backbreaking work in not a lot of time, but has had plenty to eat and has gotten enough sleep besides. Erwin recognizes the soft black tunic he wears, but it stretches over new muscle on his chest and shoulders. His hair is cut close to his head, shorter than Erwin has ever seen it, and Erwin marvels at how open it leaves him. Like he has nowhere to hide his scowl, or in this case his beam.

It passes fast when Levi realizes the burly blond standing awkwardly at the counter is just another customer. Erwin watches off to the side, as the giant man he followed into the shop blushes and mumbles something about Levi’s famous virility tea. It hurts to watch Levi’s beam vanish as if it was never there. But the little man recovers fast.

He cocks one eyebrow at the huge man (cricking his neck) as if to ask, _really?_ Then he dares to sweep his assessment all the way down and slowly back up, lingering obviously at the guy’s crotch before meeting his eyes again.

He crosses his arms. Up goes the other eyebrow ( _really??_ ). The customer just wrings his hat tighter.

Erwin vibrates with laughter. He never fully understood Levi’s ability to push every behavioral boundary. He wonders how much of it is just being so damned small. Some variation on the jester getting away with things the rest of the court never could dream of.

That night Erwin finds himself in Levi’s tiny bedroom. The ceiling curves low, so low he’d have to duck in his past life. But now he can just turn in the center of the dim, comforting room, taking in the soft green curtains on the windows and the colorful braided rug on the rough wood floor, the little bed. There are drawings tacked up on the whitewashed walls. He recognizes himself in all of them, in long and beautiful charcoal lines.

He turns to his Levi, watching him pull the black shirt over his head and drop it carelessly on the floor. His silvery eyes are dark, doing their uncanny trick of finding his in all the emptiness of the room. They find him, and command him, leaving him powerless to do anything but watch.

As Levi unbuttons his trousers with the deliberateness of a striptease. As he spreads his nakedness out on his bed, scarred and perfect. As he throws his head back, creases his brows, bites his lip so hard Erwin imagines those are _his_ teeth pushing into his soft skin. That’s _his_ hand, bringing Levi such pleasure. Those are _his_ moans, _his_ shuddery breaths as they lie together, tangled and spent and drifting towards sleep.

*

The last time Erwin sees Levi again, he almost laughs at where he finds him.

He doesn’t know how Levi managed to get himself to the roof, one more time. It’s a place where they’ve met again and again over the years, a place that takes some acrobatics to get to, through Levi’s porthole of a bedroom window and up and over the deep eaves. He’s in no shape to do that anymore but Erwin knows there’s no one alive who could stop Levi from doing something he’s put his mind to.

Erwin stretches out next to him, and the thatch of the roof is as good as a mattress for them as they look up at the stars.

It’s a clear night. The light above is so sharp Erwin has no trouble making out Levi’s drawn face. His breath is heavy, labored in a way Erwin never heard even when Levi was pushing his body to its limits as he fought and ran and flew. He’s close, Erwin knows, as true to him as the fact that he had blond hair.

“Waiting for that damn comet,” Levi whispers suddenly, in a fragile onion-skin voice. Erwin almost startles at his unexpected words. There’s the ghost of an upturn in the corners of his lips. “Fucker better hurry up.”

 _Twice in a human lifetime,_ Erwin says, smiling, fitting himself along Levi’s empty spaces and doing his best to ease the tension he feels in each muscle, each tendon. He may be deluding himself but he feels Levi unwind, just a bit.

He thinks Levi is done, doesn’t want him to waste words when it’s obvious how hard it is for him to speak. But his big eyes turn over to find Erwin without hesitation and Erwin feels their tears in his own.

 _Thank you,_ Levi’s eyes tell him. Then they widen, and the pain in his face softens, and Erwin has a moment to wonder –

_Is that what it was like for me…?_

As a white tail of fire launches across the sky above.

**Author's Note:**

> Not gonna lie, cried like a baby while writing this.
> 
> So i got to thinking: you know the old cliche, the dead live on in the memories of the living? What if that was literally true...? What if each time we thought of someone who's gone, they really did come to life, in some way and for some purpose? Then to just mess me up more, i wondered if all along in this story Erwin is just a projection of Levi's imagination, a way he would imagine Erwin would react to what happens in Levi's life after he's gone. Erwin is suspiciously uninterested in Deep Thoughts here after all and is led much more by his senses. Or, maybe The Commander is finally able to just *be*....?
> 
> Props to Kate Bush's [The Sensual World](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fsbKeX_ZhDw) for the title and soundtrack. And thank you so much for reading!!!


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